Motivations: Women of Power

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I got the idea for Women of Power from Feedbooks.com.  Feedbooks was one of the early sites to get great ebook downloads (though I think it has suffered a bit since they went commercial).  One of the great things among their original books back in 2009, were fan-fiction comics– mini books with comic book covers that were prose inside.  They were mostly based on DC characters like Batman and The Teen Titans.  I decided to try my hand at writing one of those.

There was a whole club and web organization which assigned which books each writer was working on.  That seemed like a whole lot of trouble to me.  Plus I just like to go with my own characters, so that’s what I did.  I made up All American Girl and Skygirl and patterned their descriptions after some cover art I purchased for the “comics.”  I wrote and posted the first two “issues,” but by the time I had finished “issue” (read chapter) three.  I decided that I wanted to make it a full novella.  I set it aside and didn’t get back to it for two years.

You can still find issue 1 of Women of Power still floating around the internet.  I took issue 2 down because it was significantly different than what became chapter two in the book, and I didn’t want people reading the former and then jumping into chapter 3 of the latter and getting lost.

My son and I plotted out a sequel, but I’ve since lost my notes on it.  In any case, I don’t think I’ll ever get around to writing it.

Motivations: His Robot Wife

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His Robot Wife was written for entirely different reasons than any other book I’ve written.  All the other books (with maybe the exception of His Robot Girlfriend) were written because I thought I had a great story to tell and I wanted to tell it.  You could say that I wrote His Robot Wife for money, though that’s not entirely accurate.  I priced it an 99 cents even though I could have made more by pricing it higher.  I wrote it because I knew it would sell.

I publish His Robot Girlfriend in 2008, and it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.  Many people wrote and asked for a sequel.  This was a big deal for me.  But I didn’t have a story.  As far as I was concerned, the story of Mike and Patience was over.  Still, people kept asking.  It took me three years to come up with a story for them, and I think it’s probably my weakest plot (but HRG wasn’t popular for its plot, but rather its characters anyway).  So in 2011 I wrote His Robot Wife.  It is short, at 28,000 words, but it went easily enough, and as it turned out, it has sold more copies than all my other books put together.

 

 

Motivations: The Drache Girl

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The Drache GirlThe Drache Girl was originally the second part of the three part novel I wrote in 2007-2008. While I was writing it, it was known as “Colony.” It takes place a little over three years after the events in what became The Voyage of the Minotaur. When I was done, I decided to call it The Sorceress’s Apprentice, but ultimately changed that title to the current one. I don’t know if that was the best decision or not. I wanted to be more original, but the other might have caught more readers’ eyes.

As I mentioned before, this book was inspired by Lord of the Rings, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, James Michener’s Hawaii, and the movie Zulu. The idea was to create a fantasy world mirroring British colonial imperialism. This part of the story also owes something to British TV series “Hamish MacBeth,” which inspired much of the character of PC Saba Colbshallow, though he had always been planned to have been a copper.

I enjoyed writing The Drache Girl probably more than any other book I’ve written. I really enjoyed the characters at this point in the story– especially Senta and her friends and Saba Colbshallow. It ended up taking me a looong time to publish because I decided ultimately that there needed to be another book between The Voyage of the Minotaur and The Drache Girl: The Dark and Forbidding Land.

Motivations: The Dark and Forbidding Land

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The Dark and Forbidding LandThe Dark and Forbidding Land was the first of two books that I squeezed between the events that happened in the original outline of Senta and the Steel Dragon, the other being The Young Sorceress. I enjoyed writing TDAFL and I think it works well. Part of that was because writing about Senta as a pre-teen was my favorite part of writing the entire series.

One of the challenges of writing this book was not to top the events in The Drache Girl. I didn’t want Senta aged 10 to be more powerful and experienced than Senta aged 12. Remember Star Wars, where we watch R2-D2 trudge around in the desert in episode 4, only to find out in episode 1, that he could fly?

The other challenge that I had was that I knew there were going to be characters who were going to die, based on my single book outline. But I was limited in which characters I could kill, because some of them appeared in The Drache Girl and The Two Dragons which were already written. So I sat down and created a whole pack of characters who, unbeknownst to them, were doomed. The down side of this was that I ended up liking several of them and was sorry to see them go. Not all of them ended up dying. So, there are a couple of characters who appear only in books 2 and 4.

I am currently re-editing The Dark and Forbidding Land. My son says it is his favorite book in the series. When I created the new book covers for the series, book 2 just had to have a T-Rex on it.  I had a choice of one with a red head, as described in the book or one that looked more realistic.  I had to go realistic.

Motivations: Tesla’s Stepdaughters

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Tesla's StepdaughtersThe idea for Tesla’s Stepdaughters came while I was playing Rock Band 2 on my Nintendo Wii. I was playing it a lot over the summer in 2009. As part of the game, you create your band, and the band I created became The Ladybugs. The original band name was actually Tesla’s Stepdaughters, but when I got around to writing the story, it just seemed to make more sense that the band standing in historically for The Beatles would have a similar name.

I am really pleased with Tesla’s Stepdaughters. I think I was successful in creating a setting for the story, without delving too deeply into it. I’m really happy with my mystery. I never really thought I would be able to write a mystery story, and while some might point out that the mystery is the weakest part of the story (and I wouldn’t argue that), for me, I’m pretty pleased.

Recently, Tesla’s Stepdaughters has been getting more and more interest.  It continues to slowly climb in sales and is the best selling of any of my single (non-series) books.

Motivations: The Voyage of the Minotaur

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The Voyage of the MinotaurThe Voyage of the Minotaur was actually the second novel that I wrote– sort of. As I mentioned the other day, it was originally the first part of a very long novel– almost 400,00 words, about 850 pages. I was almost done with this book before I even had a working title, but settled on The Steel Dragon, and this of course later became Senta and the Steel Dragon. The three parts were originally called– Expedition, Colony, Dominion.

After the book was done and had gone through editing, I decided that it was just too big and had to be split into three parts. So part one became The Voyage of the Minotaur.

Several things influenced me to devise this story. A friend had encouraged me to self-publish Princess of Amathar, and the success of that book, minor though it was, encouraged me to write a second. Lord of the Rings had just come out and so I was already thinking of a three part fantasy story. I had also just read Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and remembered his notes about it being his Lord of the Rings. Finally, I had recently watched James Michener’s Hawaii. Putting this all together with several non-fiction books I had recently read about colonial imperialism (particularly Britain in Africa), I came up with the story outline for Senta and the Steel Dragon.

I wanted a story that told about colonialism over a long period– in this case about ten years. I had thought about how badly native people were treated by the colonial powers and wondered just how much worse it would have been if those natives were an entirely different species. I already had a world map that I had created a few years earlier when I had toyed with the idea of writing a role-playing setting. All of this went into the mix. I also used the setting I had created twenty years before for a few fantasy vignettes I had written– the otherworldly place that people visit when they use the magic drug opthalium. Throwing all this into the mix, I just started writing. It took 14 months to write the drafts for what became three books.

Motivations: Brechalon

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BrechalonBy the end of 2009, I had already decided that I was going to publish The Voyage of the Minotaur myself. I had three fairly popular free books out there– His Robot Girlfriend, and the two Eaglethorpe Buxton stories. So I thought, what I really need is a prequel to distribute free that will drive interest for The Voyage of the Minotaur and subsequent books.

Brechalon was a difficult task, because I was trying to set up what would happen in a year or two before the action really starts. Two of my main characters were at this point fairly uninteresting children and a third was in prison. I decided to focus on the others, so I had the Iolanthe-Terrence-Yuah story line, the Iolanthe-Zeah story line and the Augie story line. In addition I followed Zurfina into the prison. Those decisions brought out a couple of other weaknesses. The most interesting thing about Terrence is his drug addiction, but I couldn’t show too much of it without giving it away, and the most interesting thing about Zurfina is her magic, and she was in an anti-magic prison cell. In the end, I was pretty happy with the story, though I don’t think it does much more than hint at what really is to come in The Voyage of the Minotaur.

One of the big inspirations for Augie’s part of the story, as well as the battle scenes in The Voyage of the Minotaur was the movie Zulu starring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker.  I think Augie and Terrence probably owe a lot to the characters in the movie (loosely based on real military heroes.)

Of course, it hasn’t been nearly as popular, even given it’s free, as His Robot Wife or Eaglethorpe, but I have had more than one person tell me they’ve read The Voyage of the Minotaur because they first read Brechalon, so it is serving its purpose.

I really like the new cover.  I designed the covers for the series myself, so I take all the blame or credit such as there is.

Motivations: Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Sorceress

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Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Sorceress tops 40,000 DownloadsI had finished Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Elven Princess and had a lot of fun writing it. I was still busily trying to find a publisher for Senta and the Steel Dragon, so I decided to spend my free time writing a second Eaglethorpe book.

A few years ealier, I had written a little play, which was performed by the Brown Junior High Drama Club to great success, and I decided that this play had been written by Eaglethorpe. The play involves characters from his world– specifically the parents of the Queen of Aerithraine, so it fit.  Incidentally, there were two showings of this play, which went really well, and I taped one of them using a big old VHS camcorder.  About two years later, my wife taped over it.  I don’t remember what show she taped now.

I was watching lots of Shakespeare at the time I was writing Eaglethorpe and you will see a lot of not so subtle nods to the Bard. The third part of Eaglethorpe (which is  in The Many Adventures of Eaglethorpe Buxton) is really a continuation of the story in Sorceress.

Another bit of trivia: In the old D&D game that I played with my kids many years ago, Myolaena, the sorceress in this story, had a sister– Zurfina, whom you’ll recognize from Senta and the Steel Dragon.

Motivations: Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Elven Princess

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Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Elven Princess tops 7,000 & 8,000 DownloadsIt was 2009 and His Robot Girlfriend was being dowloaded by the tens of thousands. I had just finished editing The Voyage of the Minotaur and was entering it into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. (It made it to round two.) So what to write next?

I wanted to do something short and fun and I decided on a fantasy comedy. I had read and enjoyed Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, particularly the character of Lemony Snicket who is narrator and somehow involved with the characters and frequently hints at things outsidet the story. I decided that my hero would be a story-teller who changed the story to suit himself. Eaglethorpe Buxton was born.

I set the story in (sort of) the world I had created for my D&D campaign. My kids still have fond memories of some of the settings in which the stories take place and even met some of the characters when they played– notably Queen Elleena of Aerithraine. I had a lot of fun writing EBEP and many people have written to tell me that they like him. I’ve heard a few negative comments too, but that’s okay.

The book is very short and was always intended as a freebie, but there are a very few paperback copies around.

Motivations: His Robot Girlfriend

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His Robot Girlfriend is Free on iBooksIt was 2008, and I had just finished writing the first draft of a massive fantasy novel that I was calling The Steel Dragon. This would eventually become The Voyage of the Minotaur, The Drache Girl, and The Two Dragons. I printed up 10 copies and handed them out to friends to read and edit over the summer. Each one was a 4″ thick notebook. I had also just self-published Princess of Amathar.

While I was waiting for the editing to be completed, I thought I needed something to post to Feedbooks and Manybooks to get my name out there. I had written some sci-fi flash fiction a few years earlier and thought I could piece them together to make a novel. This became the first half of His Robot Girlfriend and I wrote the other half over the summer (while teaching summer school). I published it online and was astounded at the interest. At one time, it was the third most downloaded book on Feedbooks.

His Robot Girlfriend succeeded in getting my name out there. It’s been downloaded almost 500,000 times, has been reviewed numerous times, and I get many emails and notes from people that enjoy it. Part of this has to do with the fact that it came out at the same time that Apple Books was founded.  It was in the top ten free downloads on what was then called iBooks, for years.  That being said, I think it’s far from my best story.

One comment that detractors frequently make about His Robot Girlfriend (feedback is overwhelmingly positive) is that Patience has no will of her own. She is a robot, duh! But this gave me an idea for the new book– His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue. It shows a bit more from her point of view and we find out that not everything is as Mike thinks it is.

The newest edition of the series will be His Robot Wife: A Great Deal of Patience, and will be the first full-length novel featuring the characters.  And as they title suggests, it will feature a great deal of Patience.